Quick report
- Red Flags
- Wind Loading, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Some shallow pockets of windslab and fresh cornices that formed overnight. New snow seemed too wet and dense to be moved around much by the light-moderate winds during the day.</p> <p>The upper snowpack is a bit of a mess of layers of heavy snow, ice pellets/graupel, and soggy half-frozen crusts. We didn't do any formal tests, but dropping a medium-sized cornice on a NW facing slope produced no results. I would expect that any prolonged periods of sun or rain as this storm wraps up have the potential to set off some bigger wet slides down to the old snow surface from before last weekend's storm.</p>
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>Kicked off lots of small wet slabs and wet loose avalanches exiting emma ridges in the early afternoon. Slow moving, limited to new snow only, easy to manage.</p> <p>Not very reactive today but could be a bit more of a concern tomorrow if the precip and wind keep up tonight.</p>
Rather dense new layer, mostly made up of ice pellets and other non-snowflake type frozen precip. Snow surface was getting damp on all aspects below 8500 or so after noon. Stout supportable crust under new snow on S. facing, semi-breakable damp crust under W and E facing. No crust layer on top of saturday night's snowfall on sheltered high N. facing.
Riding conditions were good on high N. facing and decent enough everywhere else.